National Defence Committee on Oct. 20th, 2011

[MGen Steve Bowes]

Ma'am, that's an excellent question.

The way around that is that we have 10 reserve brigades across the country and each one of them is responsible for generating internally a territorial battle group. Knowing that part-time soldiers are not always available at every given time, it takes a certain number of reservists to ensure that you have a territorial battle group that is able to train. That's an all-arms team.

What that means is that all the different units are represented inside the territorial battle group: engineers, artillery, infantry, armour, and armoured reconnaissance in particular. That territorial battle group goes through stages of training that are similar in concept and principle to the regular force. They go to the field. They start out working in the field at an individual level and within their particular unit, but we bring them up through the training year together to work as a team.

As an example, some of the units will go to Gagetown to spend a week of training. This past summer, we had 1,100 reservists in Wainwright from two different land-force areas, in some cases representing 11 or 12 different units working together in a similar unit doing the job. We bring them together. That is crucial to the way forward in providing a capability so that we can respond to any incident scenario in Canada. We're using the territorial battle group in the reserve as a way of ensuring that reservists get training together and are also able to provide a response capability as required. That is very important.

The second aspect to that is that we're looking for increased opportunities to continue with regular and reserve training together. As we deploy a regular unit, we will bring out elements of the reserve. And even if the regular unit may be in the field for three or four weeks, the reservists can go out, spend a week with the regular unit, and then go back to their jobs. So we seek to bring those opportunities together.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you very much. Your time is up.

Mrs. Gallant, it's your turn.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and through you to the General.

Afghanistan has shown us that we're no longer involved in conventional warfare necessarily, but have gone to asymmetric warfare. We're no longer engaging in battles in open fields, but with an enemy that hides itself within the actual population.

Can you tell us what changes there have been in training, operational planning, and doctrine to that end, and if there is any training on identifying behaviours of people in a crowd to help the soldiers distinguish potential belligerents hiding amongst civilians?

[MGen Steve Bowes]

No matter where we go today, we are in some ways heavily influenced by the perception that there is either conventional conflict or counter-insurgency. The reality is that the conflict scenarios produce a level of asymmetry that you talked about, where the threats can vary, so that at any time we could encounter a threat from a near-peer, that is, somebody who is capable of an armoured manoeuvre, has armoured fighting vehicles, and has the capacity to inflict great damage, all the way down to insurgent-type activity in that environment. So we expect to be going into that scenario.

The term we coin is “full-spectrum operations”. We have to be able to do a little bit of that every time we go out the door; then we simply shift as required to meet that challenge. We do train soldiers, and I remember my own training. We looked at behaviour patterns and what were the tell-tale signs. I can't go into a great deal of detail as to how we do that, but we use a consistent process in-theatre where we are continuously watching and trying to develop what we think are the enemy's tactics, techniques, and procedures, how they're going to conduct an operation. Then we inform our soldiers. This is a daily process. “What did you see?” “Well, I saw this, I saw that, here's what happened.” We try to train our soldiers about the things to look for. Even on my last tour as a general officer in Kabul, I was particularly aware of that , because I was in a different area of operation with a different group that used a different methodology to prosecute its attacks. So we continually seek to do that.

It will be no different going into any other theatre. We would look for those kinds of signs. That's simply part of our training.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

The tempo of training on an individual basis seems to have really sped up. A few years ago, you used to graduate maybe two primary leadership courses in a summer, but last summer there was a graduation every two weeks. How long will that tempo continue in training?

[MGen Steve Bowes]

It will take years. There's a perception that the army has gone through Afghanistan with a lot of resources dedicated towards it and that it is in good shape coming out of this. That's a superficial view. What we have to be aware of is that we've been putting a tremendous amount of resources towards prosecuting a mission, and this has led to that increased tempo of soldiers.

We also were under-strength. If you think back to 2005, we had a number of units that were under-strength, so we recruited soldiers. Those soldiers are now junior leaders, the primary land qualification that you referred to, the master corporals. Those master corporals are our future sergeants and warrant officers.

We have many units in various occupations where we lack sufficient warrant officers and sergeants to bring the units up to full strength. In the future, we will continue to train those. At the same time we're training them, we have to backfill that base, otherwise we will go right back to where we were, to the hollowness that we had pre-2005. That didn't stand anybody in good stead—certainly not Canada. Our capability was not what it should have been.

The tempo is going to remain high.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Training is a huge component of the army's operational readiness. I have to say I'm impressed. I sat in on some of the courses getting soldiers ready to go to Afghanistan and witnessed the speed with which you're bringing the lessons learned right to the people who are about to go out. There's nothing more powerful than having a recent amputee give that IED awareness course to a group of people.

What is the speed? If something happens in a deployment, how fast can you get that knowledge to the people who are getting ready to go?

[MGen Steve Bowes]

Sometimes we can do it in days. I wouldn't want to say less than that, but sometimes in days. Sometimes it can take a month to get it properly instituted, or a couple of months. If you're dependent on equipment to enable it, it can take longer.

As an example, I sent a team to conduct a reconnaissance of the mission in Kabul right now, to ensure that the training we are doing is what they need. They provided feedback. I brought that reconnaissance team back. I've modified my direction in response to this guidance. That is being used in Gagetown right now by the 2nd Battalion Royal Canadian Regiment to train the soldiers who are going to go in the new year. We can be that rapid. It depends on the complexity of the issue.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you. Your time has expired.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

It goes by fast when you're having fun.

Mr. Kellway, it's your turn.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Speaking of having fun, I looked at the subject matter for today and I wasn't all that excited. But full credit goes to you, General, for making doctrine a very interesting subject.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

But I would like to take a step back from some of the questions that you have been asked to try to better understand what doctrine actually is or means. In the material you presented today, either your speaking notes or the slides, is the doctrine actually expressed? Is slide 4, for example, a reduced statement of our current doctrine?

[MGen Steve Bowes]

As I alluded to in my comments, doctrine is one of those words that really throws people. Somebody could say, as an example, that a certain tactic—how we do a thing—constitutes a doctrine. That's not really true. Doctrine is a higher-level piece; it's how we solve problems. It's things like mission command, understanding a commander's intent, giving subordinates resources.

Training for full spectrum operations, the example you referred to on slide 4, I wouldn't necessarily call that doctrine. Those are principles that underscore our environment. Doctrine is not something that you would find, as an example. Many soldiers would express it that way. I'm trying to simplify a complex piece.

When I think of conducting land operations, those principles are embedded there. As I move down to that particular level of doctrine, it is embedded. From some perspectives, what you see there is part of it.

The thing to remember about doctrine is that it's layered. We have capstone manuals and then we work down, all the way down through a series of levels to the appropriate arm. How does armoured reconnaissance conduct its mission set? How do the engineers conduct their mission set? There are many different levels.

I find that sometimes people want to use doctrine to wrap it all together, and that sometimes is not helpful.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Okay, that helps me. So if we were to try to read the current doctrine, we would effectively be talking of mountains of paperwork, in a sense. It's not reducible to X. It flows, if I understood you correctly, from some principles that are set out.

Where do those principles come from?

[MGen Steve Bowes]

To perhaps bring that back home, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, they come from an accepted body of knowledge within the profession. We look at what our allies are doing. We look at what we have done. We look at our history and what our experiences have been. We look at our values. In many senses, how we conduct operations is a direct result of our Canadian value set. All of that is used by the profession to determine our doctrine, our problem set.

Canadians are very accustomed to exercising initiative. That is in contrast to many other armies around the world in different sets. We rely on individuals. We relied on NCOs, as an example, in World War II.

There are so many examples we are familiar with, where individuals recognized that an order that was given might not survive the friction of conflict, and they've had to exercise their initiative to achieve a higher commander's intent. They go on to do that, because it is the right thing to do. That value system we have developed over years is embedded in our doctrine.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Are the principles politically influenced or given to some extent, or is it all internal to the Forces?

I can give you an example. The notion of having full spectrum operations is a kind of statement of principle. Is that something that's provided to the Forces as a principle from which its doctrine flows?

[MGen Steve Bowes]

You need to be cautious there. The tasks or the expectations—the missions sets that Canadian Forces are expected to fulfill and, therefore, the Army—are provided by the government. But that expression of doctrine and how we do that is a professional body of knowledge; it's no different from the legal profession, the medical profession, etc.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Somewhere in the doctrine today, can we find statements about humanitarian missions or peacekeeping missions? Does that form part of the doctrine?

[MGen Steve Bowes]

Absolutely. We have doctrines on stability operations. Even within the context of the counter-insurgency manual, you find very clear indications of what the expectations are for Canadian soldiers when they prosecute operations.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Your time has expired.

Mr. Strahl, you have the floor.

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

General, I want to thank you again for being part of our experience at CFB Wainwright and the CMTC. It was certainly eye-opening. Some around this table had been there before, but I had not. It is a first-class facility.

We discussed training while were there and a bit of what a soldier goes through prior to being deployed in the field. I am wondering if you could walk the committee through how long and what levels of training they go through, from the time they walk into a recruiting centre to the time they are deployed. What is a typical timeframe for that to take place?

[MGen Steve Bowes]

It would almost be impossible for a Canadian soldier to be recruited and end up overseas in an operation inside one year. A Canadian soldier goes through recruiting through Saint-Jean, and a basic military qualification can take two to three months. Oftentimes, there'll be a period of a few weeks, perhaps even a month or two, before the next series of training would begin for their various occupations.

Let me use an infantryman as an example. They would undertake training at one of the army training centres across the country and become qualified. They would then be posted to their battalion. They immediately embark on another series of qualifications on platoon level weapons, and things that they would be expected to use.

Then when they go into the collective training cycle of that particular unit--say if this recruit were in a battalion that was going to go out the door for operations--they would begin by conducting a series of what we call levels 1-to-7 training. They would go through individual battle task standards, then they would work as a team within the section under the leadership of a sergeant, with a master corporal as the second in command, and work through the tactics, techniques, and procedures in the drills they would be expected to perform. Then they work within the context of a platoon, then within the context of a company. There's a lot of that training that has to be done in garrison before we get to the field.

When they get to the field, they're ready to work together as a team, normally implying they can go to the field and train at a platoon level. So a platoon can literally just go out and do its training and normally that platoon commander would be training the younger sergeants beneath him. And so it goes all the way up to what you saw, which was a brigade and a brigade commander. And although we were doing things to help train his staff, the primary training audience was actually the companies inside the battalions.

So there's training ongoing at multiple different levels concurrently, because we have to do that. Resources are finite, but the primary audience there was a level 4 to 5, within a level 6 context. To us that means the company level within the battle group.

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Thank you.

Can you compare, perhaps, what the state of operational readiness of troops was prior to 2001 when we deployed to Afghanistan to where it is now? Is the situation different? How has that improved?